Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Its like the epcot center, or something.

Louisa Lim is doing a week long series on NPR about the construction boom in Shanghai, including a weird plan to create 9 satellite towns housing 500,000 people each designed in the style of a different country (6 European styles, 2 Chinese styles, and one Canadian). It sounds a lot like the fake villages at the EPCOT center, except that people are actually supposed to live there.

Lim's most recent broadcast ended with some serious, and probably needed editorializing: "And with homes priced out of the market for many, Shanghai's plans for its satellite towns are placing gimmicky foreign settlements above the real needs of its own people."